"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government." ~ Jacob Hornberger

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Columns by Bob Wallace

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When I was in college, the best salesman in the world talked me into buying a pair of Allen Edmonds shoes -- specifically the Malverns. They cost $75.
They were the best shoes I ever had. Unfortunately, I didn't take particularly good care of them. I wore them every day, I once dried them on the heat register (the toes...

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Of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, all of them, except for Ron Paul, are whores and puppets for international bankers and international corporations (I call them Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations). And Paul doesn’t stand a chance, because he is an adult.
It doesn't matter if Obama is re-elected, or...

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Several pundits (among them William Bennett and Ann Coulter) have claimed Prohibition worked. They’re right. It did work…sort of.
Alcohol consumption dropped by 50%, cirrhosis of the liver by 63%, admissions for alcohol psychosis by 60%, and arrests for drunk and disorderly, by 50%.
That’s the good news....

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If fascism ever comes to America, it won’t be through insignificant groups such as American Nazis or the KKK, both of which together could field a couple of softball teams. It’ll come through “Christians,” specifically the blood-thirsty ones who support war.
This kind of Christian supports the State, and...

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“The opposite of war is not peace; it's creation.” ~ Jonathan Larson
Back when I was in college (close to worthless then and even closer now, except for the hard sciences) I realized none of my classes that I was really interested in were logically connected to each other, so that I could come up with an accurate model of...

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It is unfortunate there has to be a distinction between “true law” and “false law.” True law is discovered; false law is made up.
No one trained in any hard science believes law can be made up. None of them will tell you that you can take cyanide without harm, or jump out of an airplane without a parachute. ...

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It was Aristotle who observed there are two kinds of ignorance: when you’re ignorant and know it, and when you’re ignorant and don’t know it. The second kind of ignorance is the dangerous kind, because people who are ignorant and don’t know it usually think they’re smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone else...

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“Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason, and invective for documentation than in politics. This is a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color.” ~ John Mason Brown, Through These Men (1956)
I sometimes entertain...

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“The fear of humiliation appears to be one of the most powerful motivators in individual and collective human behavior.” ~ Donald Klein
There is no light on human nature more pitiless and perceptive and accurate than mythology. Through hundreds if not thousands of years all the dross was burned away, leaving some very acute observations...

Column by Bob Wallce.
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What a philosophy claims and what it delivers are often two different things. Marxism was supposed to create a heaven on earth but instead created a hell. I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, would also create a hell on earth.
Rand divided people into two groups: her perfect John Galtian heroes, and everyone else...

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I look at life in the aggregate, that is, when you include the whole human race, as a tragicomedy. I don’t look at it as morality play, which I define as seeing life as a contest between Good and Evil. In fact, life is a tragicomedy because so many people see it as a morality play!
Here is an example. The State has defined drugs...

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The worst problem in the world – the one that causes more violence than anything else – is the revenge created by feelings of humiliation.
Thousands of years ago both the Greeks and the Hebrews noticed that pattern. The Greeks called it Hubris, the god of arrogance, lack of restraint, insolence and wanton violence, followed by Nemesis, the...

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Richard Weaver once pointed out that the original sense of the word “obscenity” meant something that “should be enacted off-stage, because it is unfit for public exhibition.”
He wrote, “they included intense suffering and humiliation, which the Greeks, with habitual perspicacity and humanity, banned from the theater....

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I have expended several thousand brain cells – which now means I am pretty much out of them – trying to figure out who are the producers and who are the parasites.
Are firefighters parasites? They don’t produce anything, but they are necessary. Are the police necessary? They don’t produce anything...

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A few months before I turned 12, I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I was never the same. Since at that age I was very susceptible to science-fiction, the novel had a profound effect on my 11-year-old sensibilities (you should have seen what Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars did to me – I read it at least...

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I’ve been a little miffed since I was 12 years old because I didn’t have a flying car, and most especially, a disintegrator ray gun. They existed in the movies, books, and on TV, but as for real life, forget it.
I can’t remember the first time I encountered both of them. I do remember a TV program about...

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It’s impossible to choose any exact point when the State started destroying families. I’d say it’s been more of a slippery slope than anything else, so you can’t choose any point and say, “This is where it started going downhill.”
But one watershed moment was in 1943, when Americans started...

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A pure, “Big L” libertarian doesn’t believe the State has any business being involved in anything. They’d like to see it gone because of the horrors it has perpetrated throughout history. Fair enough. It’s a legitimate philosophical position, and one that I am very sympathetic to. But I am more of a...

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"Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts," wrote Plotinus. A similar theme runs through most of the older mythologies: Did we come from the beasts or from the gods? Are we merely more evolved animals or fallen angels?
The answer, refined through millennia, is this: We're part beast, but far better...

By Bob Wallace.
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No one believes in equality, no matter what they claim. To be totally equal, people would have to be totally identical, the way two quarters or two nickels are identical. And being identical, they’d be interchangeable.
The closest to total equality and total identicalness in nature are bees and ants, but even they are not...

By Bob Wallace.
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Oh, if only the Left was right and people were infinitely malleable blank slates! My heart would soar if it was true. All the differences between men, women, races and ethnic groups – if they were all environmental, just twiddle some societal knobs, and presto-chango! We’d get just about as close to Heaven on Earth as we...

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The Four Cardinal Virtues are not what most people think they are. Justice and Courage sound like good things; Prudence and Temperance, don’t, not really, to many people. The idea that many people have of them, they sound like they take a lot of the fun out of life. But in reality they are good things. It’s just that...

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"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies...." ~ Henry David Thoreau
"All machines are amplifiers" ~ Cooper's Law
That's a true saying: Machines are amplifiers, amplifiers of our inherent abilities. Machines are not moral or immoral; they're amoral. They can be used for good or...

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I once received an email which read, in part: "Charles Lindbergh was a traitor who tried to sell out his country to the Nazis just as many leftists today would sell us out to the Islamo-Fascists."
The letter was in response to my review of Philip Roth's libelous (and boring) novel, The Plot Against America, an odious attempt at an "alternate history...

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There are several reasons why the State will never win the Drug War, but one not often discussed is the Arndt-Schultz Law. It is a biological law that states, "Small doses stimulate, medium doses poison, and large doses kill."
Probably the best-known examples of this law are vaccines. They are small doses that stimulate the body's immune system to defend...

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Several years ago I was bamboozled into babysitting one evening for a seven-year-old girl and two boys aged five and three. Since one of my main purposes in life is to lie on the couch and dream of partially-clad women feeding me grapes (as Bob Hope once said in a movie, "I've had women chase me before, but never when I was awake"), I had to figure out how...

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The United States is a empire. Some cheer that fact. I'm not one of them, and I consider such people deluded, since all empires fail, and it's going to happen to the United States , too.
There are several reasons why all empires fail, but there are two that stand out: the financialization of the economy, and an intolerant "us vs. them" religion.
Those two reasons...

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In one easy step, here's how we do it: pull out completely. That's it. Just leave. The countries will do just fine without us.
I'll use history as a guide. In the 20th Century, America won just one war: Vietnam.
What's that, you say? We didn't win? We left in ignoble defeat, fleeing in our helicopters and pushing them off of our ships into the blue deep sea? How is that...

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The best definition of "reason" I've encountered is "the ability to make connections." I consider it part science, part art. This might be a better definition: "the art and science of making connections."
Let's use Bugs Bunny for an example. Bugs belongs to the archetype known as the Trickster. This archetype exists in nearly every culture and is...

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The usual definition of a chickenhawk is someone who supports war but actively avoids fighting. Whenever I think of one, what comes to my mind are Young Republicans, but also leftists, who are just as bad if not worse.
A writer, whose name unfortunately completely escapes me, said the aforementioned definition is not totally accurate. A better one is that a chickenhawk is...

Every tribe in the world, past, present, and I guarantee you future, has referred to itself as "the Humans" or "the People" or "the Chosen," defining itself as human and relegating those outside the tribe to non-human and non-people status. The Chinese called China "the Middle Kingdom" (the middle of the Earth) and the Greeks called their local sea the Mediterranean (also the middle of the Earth...

I had a lot of jobs in high school and college. I was a carpenter for my father when I was a teen, one who bashed his thumb with a hammer, used a crowbar to unstick boots from plywood decks when the boot's owners nail-gunned their own feet, and put a lot of band-aids on, including on people who ran power saws over their own hands.

Three of my favorite writers are Mark Twain, F. Paul Wilson, and Manly Wade Wellman. The first everyone knows, the second, a lot, but not as much as the first, and the third, unless you are interested in Ozark horror tales and early American music (think of the song, "Shenandoah,") hardly anyone at all.

The first novel I read that impressed upon me the necessity of an armed populace as a bulwark against the depredations of the State was A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, published in 1951. I even remember where I read it: in Anthony Boucher's two-volume A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Last story in the set, book two. I still have my copies.

I doubt it takes more than a quarter-page of instructions to conquer the world. Heck, if the Ten Commandments (technically, "Ten Words" or "Ten Utterances" are pretty much the basis for a free and prosperous society, why should it takes a book/books to learn how to conquer the planet? Aren't they are just really several easily-memorized rules?
So here they are:
First Rule: The leaders count,...

There is a woman I call She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, after the queen in H. Rider Haggard's novel, She. A few months ago, SWMBO decided my poor pitiful self needed a dog, specifically a pug dog, who, at ten weeks old when I got him, was about eight inches long. His being so tiny was a mistake.
As we were driving back the few hundred miles from the breeder, she held this dog (" Norman ") in her lap...

"Great men are almost always bad men," wrote Lord Acton. From their badness you can learn much about the flaws inherent in the mass of people. Disease is as instructive as health, since it tells people to flee the former and seek the latter. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, many people can't tell the difference between the two, and in fact see disease as health, unholiness as holiness...

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that millions of people can be led around by their noses by as small a group of people as six or eight. I can't call them "wolves" and "sheep" because the sheep are willing participants in their delusions, which they don't see as delusion but instead see as truth, and the leaders really aren't wolves. All just have bad ideas that they think are good ones...

Even though I am opposed to the current wars, and believe they will cause nothing but trouble for decades to come, in a sense they don't exist for me, and, I suspect, for a lot of other people.
Because of Vietnam , in which domestic protests involved several bombings and many riots, war has now been sanitized and removed as far as possible from the public. There is no draft these days; instead...

When I was in college, I took four economics courses: Principles of Macro, Principles of Micro, and Intermediate Macro and Intermediate Micro. Half of the material -- the free market half -- made sense. The other half, being Keynesian/Marxist nonsense, should have been junked 60 years ago.

My last article was a review of Humberto Fontova's book about Castro and Cuba , Fidel, Hollywood 's Favorite Tyrant.
Every letter I got from a Cuban-American said yes, you got it right. Yet I also got some letters praising Castro. Here is one:
"Dear Bob,

There are some things I cannot comprehend. I can barely understand sky-diving, but do understand it enough so I might even do it myself someday. I'm sure I'd be screaming all the way down, though. However, I cannot understand scuba diving. There're monsters in the ocean, ones that to me are something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Remember "Jaws"? About as far as I've ever gone into the...

I hurt my back last week. Well, technically it wasn't my back. It was my right hip, except it was in back of me. You get what I mean. Maybe I caused the problem by sitting on my wallet--the one that (in my imagination) is stuffed with cash. I had to blame it on something.

I own a runt of a pug named Norman . Sometimes I call him Woola, after the gigantic, savage (but ultimately nice) Martian hound dog in Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Warlord of Mars. Mostly, though, I call him Norman. He looks like a Norman .

Hijacker: This is a hijacking! I have a boxcutter!
Grandma: Well, I don't have a box! Instead, I have this! (whips out a pistol and points it at hijacker) Now reach for the sky, or I'll put a hole in your pointy little head!
Hijacker: (mouth dropping open) What? This is not going according to plan! Americans are not allowed to carry handguns on airplanes! I thought the liberals...

The place: Rush Limbaugh's front porch.
Rush: (watching TV) Okay, now throw the ball here. Now throw it there.
Soldier: What're you doing, Mr. Limbaugh?
Rush: Directing the war from my armchair! Oops! Another brave patriot just made the ultimate sacrifice to bring liberty to oppressed people! And to bring Jesus back! And to make sure my SUV has plenty of gas! Say, how do you like...

I have no use for the State, if State is defined as the Political Means of death, coercion, violence and theft. What good can come from the State? None.
It's been estimated States killed up to 200 million people in the 20th Century.
Think about all those lost in all of history, due to what States has done. How far behind are we? Two thousand years, maybe? Think of all the inventions lost...

It can only be described as miraculous that the writer J. G. Ballard survived almost four years in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II, four years he chronicled in Empire of the Sun. He was all of 11 years old when it happened.

There are many things that bedevil humanity. Ninety percent of them are located in human nature. If there is "evil" in the world, it comes right out of the human heart.
To say that people are "imperfect," or if you want to use religious terms, "fallen," isn't enough. What's wrong with people has to be analyzed, so it can be studied.

For some reason which I don't understand, the worst writers, like Karl Marx, are leftist, the best, such as Conrad and Dostoevsky, are conservatives, and the anarchist/libertarian ones write science-fiction, fantasy and horror. Even Tolkien, who wrote of a Stateless Shire in his first novel, The Hobbit, described himself as an "anarchist."

Wait, hold on, let me get my Tinfoil Hat! (And if you want to understand the theory behind Tinfoil Hats, and how to construct one, cast an eyeball upon Lyle Zapato's book, Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: Practical Mind Control Protection for Paranoids).
Conspiracy theories have been around since, well, the beginning of the human race. They are a constant with people, so they must fulfill a...

Several days ago, I ran across an article about a 52-year-old man who had lived with his 12-year-old daughter in a tent in a Portland , Oregon park for four years (click here). When they were discovered, the girl was described as "well-spoken beyond her years." Actually, this girl, who would have been in the seventh grade, tested at the 12th grade level. And what did her educational materials...

It is comforting to lie to oneself. Comforting, but dangerous. At times, very dangerous. It is a matter of degree: a little bit is not so bad, but a great deal can be terrible, most especially when it affects other people.

The only religious joke I tell is one I made up: the human race has Fallen and can't get up. Okay, so it's not very good, even for one of my always-bad puns. But as bad as it is, I think it is a true statement. Even a bad joke often has truth in it.
The idea that the human race is "fallen," that is, imperfect, exists in all religions. In the Western world, it's because we were, whether...

I'm certainly no expert on self-esteem, but I do know that a teacher patting a student on the head for spelling "kat" and telling him, "Well, at least you tried" is not the way to create it. And that is now what some schools (government run, of course) are telling teachers to do, in hopes of not hurting students' feelings and making them feel good about themselves.
What they're doing isn't...

There is a continual rotation of books through my house. Some I've read so many times I practically have them memorized, others I never much cared for. If I had kept every book I've bought since I starting buying them at age 11, I'd probably have about a quarter-million by the time I come out on the far end of the Geezerfier.
Some books, though, never leave. Among the non-fiction ones there...

In the West, the best-known story about a "perfect" world is that of the Garden of Eden. I find it interesting there is an angel with a flaming sword preventing us from returning to it. There is wisdom to our being barred--or actually, to our barring ourselves. The story may be just a myth, but myths that last millennia always have great truth in them; in this case, there is no perfect world,...

Oh boy. There's just no telling where my thoughts will lead me. Sometimes, to very odd places.
Let's take the concepts of Good and Evil. Just what are they? In reality, I think Good can be defined as harmony and wholeness (which is related to words "health" and "holy"). That means "evil" is the exact opposite -- lack of harmony, lack of wholeness (or "unholiness").
True "good" and "evil...

I'm not sure how it started. I think it was while watching Pinky and the Brain with a roomful of people. Children, teenagers, adults of all ages. All were laughing at the antics of a bulb-headed mutated lab mouse who wanted to conquer the world, with the aid of his dim-witted, hyperactive, worshipping sidekick. They failed every time with their Rube Goldberg plans, yet never gave up.
What...

Before he was executed, Adolf Eichmann was asked to explain his actions. "I was an idealist," he said. An idealist, one whose moral compasses were spinning madly. Perhaps all idealists, in greater or lesser degree, have such compasses. The Nazis and the Communists were idealists, as are the greenies who blow up SUV dealerships and drive spikes into trees. To them, they are right; everyone...

The evil man is the child grown strong. ~ Thomas Hobbes
If one person kills another, he is a murderer. If he kills 100, he is a monster. But if he kills 10,000, he is a hero. And the only way one can become this type of "hero" is through the agency of the State.
The victims of the worst serial killer in the world are but a drop in a lake compared to the political victims of Mao Tse Tung,...

God and Satan, in a surprise joint announcement today, informed the media that "most people today have gotten everything so wrong we decided it's time to clear things up."
"First of all," said God, "all those goofy 'Left Behind' Christian Zionists who think they can bring My Son back and end the world by unconditionally supporting Israel no matter what it does to anyone, you can just forget...

"Under-People" is the English translation of the German word "Untermenschen," made famous by Hitler in Mein Kampf. And of course, if you've got Untermenschen, you've got to have Ubermenschen, too. At least in fantasy.
And fantasy indeed is what we're dealing with in Thomas P.M. Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New Map: Peace and War in the Twenty-First Century. Only, the Over-People are what...

When I was growing up, we didn't have any hyperactive kids. We certainly didn't have anyone on Ritalin. We'd never heard of the stuff. At 11, the only "drug" we knew about was aspirin-in-Coke, which was supposed to make you drunk. (We also believed if you put a tooth or nail in Coke overnight, they would dissolve. Our experiments proved this to be not true, just as we proved that throwing...

Grrr. I don't even want to write the word anymore. At least I can do it like this: p********n. It's probably the worst insult I can imagine, worse even than "soccer mom in an SUV, blocking the intersection while babbling on her cell phone."
Dr. Jack Wheeler invented a collective noun for those, um, "people"--a "scum of politicians." It's funny, but it's an insult to scum, which must have...

Here we have a case not only of art imitating life, but attempting to nudge it back on course by making us smile a little bit. That makes the case in question, Harry Harrison's novel, Bill the Galactic Hero, a fine satire that, unlike the author's better-known Make Room! Make Room! (filmed as "People are Soylent Green!"), hasn't yet been made into a movie. And that's a shame, because I laughed...

Some people are born to be certain things. I've known singers who knew they were going to be singers at the age of five. I'm a natural-born comedian, much like a Pug dog, and even though I don't remember it, have been told by my relatives I used to crack them up at the age of five or six. I certainly remember being 13, by which time I was a class clown.
Some men are even born to be natural...

I want George Bush to lose so bad I can taste it. And it's not because I'm for Kerry. Kerry looks like what happens when Herman Munster and Gomer Pyle get into the transporter together, there's a horrible accident, and only one person comes out.
There's about a dime's worth of difference between Bush and Kerry. Contrary to the hallucinations of the Poorly Educated Who Can't Spell (also know...

It's fascinating to watch a new mythology, with new mythic characters, evolve before my eyes. I'm speaking of Chickenhawks.
I'll argue that all mythic characters, no matter how ancient, are based on people that actually existed. Not just one person, but many. People noticed their characters, and noticed them well. Stories were created about them to educate and entertain the young and old...

Glad to say, I'm not a highly-paid court intellectual, or don't have three words in my name, or a Ph.D from some effete eastern university. So, I am reduced to using what creakingly passes for my common sense. Compared to the aforementioned groups, though, I'm a genius.
My common sense notes with great dismay that there is only one way an army can defeat guerillas: kill everyone. I don't...

Dear Brainitor: So what is the real deal with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Were we really attacked because we are "good" and they are "evil"? Is it that simple?
Confused
Dear Confused,
That simple? Not even close, Confused. So, let me take a few paragraphs to...

"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." ~ Matthew 13:57
I consider myself a part-time prophet. It's more of a hobby than anything else. I'm pretty good at it, because it's not hard. I certainly don't get any honor from it, though. But as far as I'm concerned, the government should hire me, the way ancient Hebrew kings had their prophets. The kings didn't...

I consider the State to fit the archetype of the horror story: Evil intruding into Good, Chaos intruding into Order. In the State's case, it is the Political Means (theft and violence) intruding into the Economic Means (peaceable free trade). The State intrudes into Society and always damages it. As The Simpsons' Chief Wiggum so perceptively noted, "I didn't say the government couldn't harm...

I wish it was possible for someone to turn me upside down and shake out all the nonsense I still have in my head. It's been there since I was a kid. Sometimes I don't even know it's there until someone says something and I have no answer except a dumb one that was taught to me a long time ago.
The way things stand now, I'm having to remove all the silly stuff neuron by neuron, in hopes of...

Well, folks, I don't know about all of you, but I suspect George W. Bush will win the election. I'm not going to vote, because my .0000000001% of it won't do the slightest bit of good. I am not looking forward with any eagerness to another term for Dubya, but there are some minor pluses--specifically, four more years of funation and incomprehensile talking from our illustrious if squished-...

I don't think it's possible to "save" the world. I don't think it's a good idea to even try. Usually--maybe always--it involves wars and other destructive coercions of the State. "Saving the world" is just a rationalization for trying to conquer it. As both an Aesop's fable and the Bible points out, tyrants always call themselves benefactors.
The closest anyone can come to saving the world...

Bringing Jesus Back by Killing Palestinians, by Hal Lindsey and Jerry Falwell.
Smoke, Booze, Gamble, Stuff Your Fat Face and Stick Your Nose in Other's Business!, by William Bennett.
As Short and Ugly as Simon Bar Sinister, by William Kristol.
A Dumb, Cowardly Mouse, by Douglas Feith.
How a Pimple on My Butt Saved My Ass, by Rush Limbaugh.
Souffle' Restaurants for Ex-Cons, by Richard...

A woman I know recently told me her totem was a cat. I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. A totem, like a totem pole?, I wondered, my brain locked in puzzle-mode. A totem pole with a cat as part of it? What? I realized I didn't exactly know what the purpose of a totem pole was, even though, like everyone else, I knew of them. I could see one in my mind, although in her case I...

His Satanic Majesty Satan, aka Lucifer, aka Beelzebub, has recently expressed great disappointment in his current quasi-humanoid offspring, commonly known to the public as "neoconservatives."
"I have been trying for thousands of years to get humanity to follow the Left-Hand Path, and these guys are the pits at helping me," he said disgustedly, in a recent interview. "I've been behind some...

It is true the amount of comic books I read as a kid weighed more than I did. It got to the point where I couldn't lift the box in my closet in which I stored them. I wish I had kept them. I wouldn't be able to retire on their sale, but I wouldn't have any more car payments.
Comics, for me, were just way cool. I was fascinated by the multi-colored drawings depicting things impossible in...

Even a stopped clock is occasionally right. I am of course referring to Chief Wiggum of "The Simpsons," when he said, "I didn't say the government couldn't hurt you. I said it couldn't help you."
I have decided to elevate his saying to the status of a Natural Law, inherent in the universe and human nature, and unalterable no matter how many law books politicians and lawyers beat it with....

Okay, after listening to Bush babble about "changing the world for the better," I've finally been pushed over the line, just the way I used to swing back and forth in my swing-set when I was a kid until it tumped over: oops, here I am on the edge! Oops, now here I go! Bam!
I've now decided Bush is insane. I've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt: He's just dumb because his brain is...

I can't get Star Trek's Borg out of my mind. They're a horror always there, pestering me, always asking me, "What do we mean?" At least I don't dream about them telling me, "Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated," and then holding me down and using nanotechnology to drill all those contraptions into my skull and brains ("Here, you don't need these frontal lobes." Splortch.).
If I did...

All of the research I've seen over the past several years claims that men only use half their brain, while women use all of theirs. This I believe, since I can drive and listen to the radio simultaneously (obviously men use the same side of their brains for driving and music, meaning driving a car is like listening to music!) but if I have to look for an address, down goes the radio volume,...

I never cease to wonder how artists always seem to be one step ahead of everyone else. Oftentimes, several steps and several years. Sometimes, several decades. Ezra Pound, too, noticed their perplexing ability to be ahead of everyone, which is why his most famous comment is, "The artist is the antenna of the race."
Since artists are antenna, I think it would be a good idea if the government...

For the record, my drug use consists of a German white wine called Auslese.
That's it. I don't even use aspirin, because it doesn't work on me. Minimum, I need Tylenol with Codeine, which can legally be bought through the mail from Canada . I'm too lazy to get some.
However, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale as a teenager, from ages 15 to 17, on weekends. Then I quit. Some years later, I...

Column by Bob Wallace.
Exclusive to STR
"Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts," wrote Plotinus. A similar theme runs through most of the older mythologies: Did we come from the beasts or from the gods? Are we merely more evolved animals or fallen angels?
The answer, refined through millennia, is this: We're part beast, but far better...

Column by Bob Wallace.
Exclusive to STR
A few months before I turned 12, I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I was never the same. Since at that age I was very susceptible to science-fiction, the novel had a profound effect on my 11-year-old sensibilities (you should have seen what Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars did to me – I read it at least...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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I’ve been a little miffed since I was 12 years old because I didn’t have a flying car, and most especially, a disintegrator ray gun. They existed in the movies, books, and on TV, but as for real life, forget it.
I can’t remember the first time I encountered both of them. I do remember a TV program about...

Column by Bob Wallce.
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Richard Weaver once pointed out that the original sense of the word “obscenity” meant something that “should be enacted off-stage, because it is unfit for public exhibition.”
He wrote, “they included intense suffering and humiliation, which the Greeks, with habitual perspicacity and humanity, banned from the theater....

Column by Bob Wallace.
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Of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, all of them, except for Ron Paul, are whores and puppets for international bankers and international corporations (I call them Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations). And Paul doesn’t stand a chance, because he is an adult.
It doesn't matter if Obama is re-elected, or...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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It’s impossible to choose any exact point when the State started destroying families. I’d say it’s been more of a slippery slope than anything else, so you can’t choose any point and say, “This is where it started going downhill.”
But one watershed moment was in 1943, when Americans started...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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The worst problem in the world – the one that causes more violence than anything else – is the revenge created by feelings of humiliation.
Thousands of years ago both the Greeks and the Hebrews noticed that pattern. The Greeks called it Hubris, the god of arrogance, lack of restraint, insolence and wanton violence, followed by Nemesis, the...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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“The fear of humiliation appears to be one of the most powerful motivators in individual and collective human behavior.” ~ Donald Klein
There is no light on human nature more pitiless and perceptive and accurate than mythology. Through hundreds if not thousands of years all the dross was burned away, leaving some very acute observations...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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“Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason, and invective for documentation than in politics. This is a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color.” ~ John Mason Brown, Through These Men (1956)
I sometimes entertain...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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If fascism ever comes to America, it won’t be through insignificant groups such as American Nazis or the KKK, both of which together could field a couple of softball teams. It’ll come through “Christians,” specifically the blood-thirsty ones who support war.
This kind of Christian supports the State, and...

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"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies...." ~ Henry David Thoreau
"All machines are amplifiers" ~ Cooper's Law
That's a true saying: Machines are amplifiers, amplifiers of our inherent abilities. Machines are not moral or immoral; they're amoral. They can be used for good or...

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Several years ago I was bamboozled into babysitting one evening for a seven-year-old girl and two boys aged five and three. Since one of my main purposes in life is to lie on the couch and dream of partially-clad women feeding me grapes (as Bob Hope once said in a movie, "I've had women chase me before, but never when I was awake"), I had to figure out how...

By Bob Wallace.
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The Four Cardinal Virtues are not what most people think they are. Justice and Courage sound like good things; Prudence and Temperance, don’t, not really, to many people. The idea that many people have of them, they sound like they take a lot of the fun out of life. But in reality they are good things. It’s just that...

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I once received an email which read, in part: "Charles Lindbergh was a traitor who tried to sell out his country to the Nazis just as many leftists today would sell us out to the Islamo-Fascists."
The letter was in response to my review of Philip Roth's libelous (and boring) novel, The Plot Against America, an odious attempt at an "alternate history...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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I have expended several thousand brain cells – which now means I am pretty much out of them – trying to figure out who are the producers and who are the parasites.
Are firefighters parasites? They don’t produce anything, but they are necessary. Are the police necessary? They don’t produce anything...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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I look at life in the aggregate, that is, when you include the whole human race, as a tragicomedy. I don’t look at it as morality play, which I define as seeing life as a contest between Good and Evil. In fact, life is a tragicomedy because so many people see it as a morality play!
Here is an example. The State has defined drugs...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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It is unfortunate there has to be a distinction between “true law” and “false law.” True law is discovered; false law is made up.
No one trained in any hard science believes law can be made up. None of them will tell you that you can take cyanide without harm, or jump out of an airplane without a parachute. ...

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There are several reasons why the State will never win the Drug War, but one not often discussed is the Arndt-Schultz Law. It is a biological law that states, "Small doses stimulate, medium doses poison, and large doses kill."
Probably the best-known examples of this law are vaccines. They are small doses that stimulate the body's immune system to defend...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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A pure, “Big L” libertarian doesn’t believe the State has any business being involved in anything. They’d like to see it gone because of the horrors it has perpetrated throughout history. Fair enough. It’s a legitimate philosophical position, and one that I am very sympathetic to. But I am more of a...

Column by Bob Wallce.
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What a philosophy claims and what it delivers are often two different things. Marxism was supposed to create a heaven on earth but instead created a hell. I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, would also create a hell on earth.
Rand divided people into two groups: her perfect John Galtian heroes, and everyone else...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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It was Aristotle who observed there are two kinds of ignorance: when you’re ignorant and know it, and when you’re ignorant and don’t know it. The second kind of ignorance is the dangerous kind, because people who are ignorant and don’t know it usually think they’re smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone else...

By Bob Wallace.
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No one believes in equality, no matter what they claim. To be totally equal, people would have to be totally identical, the way two quarters or two nickels are identical. And being identical, they’d be interchangeable.
The closest to total equality and total identicalness in nature are bees and ants, but even they are not...

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The United States is a empire. Some cheer that fact. I'm not one of them, and I consider such people deluded, since all empires fail, and it's going to happen to the United States , too.
There are several reasons why all empires fail, but there are two that stand out: the financialization of the economy, and an intolerant "us vs. them" religion.
Those two reasons...

Column by Bob Wallace.
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“The opposite of war is not peace; it's creation.” ~ Jonathan Larson
Back when I was in college (close to worthless then and even closer now, except for the hard sciences) I realized none of my classes that I was really interested in were logically connected to each other, so that I could come up with an accurate model of...